In the early stages following the Communist coup, the Mujahedin rebels formed the predominent resistance movement to the new Marxist regime, and as such served as an obstacle to Soviet hegemony. On December 25, 1979, the USSR invaded and installed a puppet government headed by Babrak Karmal, a former deputy prime minister of Afghanistan who had been living in exile in Eastern Europe. With their puppet show in place, the Kremlin then launched a nine-year total war against the entire population of the country, violating a multitude of international conventions and even going so far as to employ the use of chemical weapons in 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev.1
In their attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, chemicals were not the only weapons that the Soviets used. In addition, the Afghan Marxist regime also went after religious believers shortly after April 1979, not allowing themselves to be deterred by Afganistan’s deeply devout Muslim culture. Even there, like everywhere, Communists tried to purge religion. The Koran was burned in public and religious practices were banned. Imams and other religious leaders were arrested and shot. On January 6, 1979, at night, all 130 men of the Moaddedi clan, a leading Shiite group, were massacred.2 The Communist regime’s goal was nothing less than to transform human nature. For such to take place, the leading rival belief system—in this case, the Islamic faith—had to be purged. Ronald Reagan frequently complained of how “evil” Communists went after religion everywhere they took power. Afghanistan was no exception.
On the whole, the Soviet war destroyed the country. Out of a preinvasion population of 15.5 million, five to six million Afghans fled to neighboring Pakistan and India, where they lived in squalor for two full decades.3 Countless Afghans were scattered among refugee camps, where they birthed over one million children who had never seen their homeland. In all, more than half the population was displaced. Observers estimate that one to two million Afghans were killed in the war with the Soviets, 90 percent of which were civilians; another two to four million were wounded.4 And long after the last Soviet soldier left, Afghans were still being maimed by the five to ten million landmines buried in their soil.
REAGAN’S REACTION
From his first days in office, Reagan made sure that he was well-versed on the subject of Afghanistan. His team would brief him routinely on developments in the country, and he would often speak with dissidents and rebel leaders about how the United States could best proceed. To Reagan, the culprit was obvious: this was yet another predictable result of Communism. He used the bully pulpit of the presidency to denounce the Soviets and their intervention, and to ratchet up rhetorical support for the resistance. When he spoke of “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua or Poland, he often hailed them in Afghanistan as well. (More accurately, the Muj were fighting for freedom from the USSR, but were hardly Jeffersonian democrats.5)
In every Captive Nations Day statement or human rights address or in most speeches blasting Communism, Reagan hit the Soviets on Afghanistan. Following the tone that he had set for Poland, Reagan issued proclamations and memorials, initiating Afghanistan Days and even releasing statements in support of the Observance of the Afghan New Year, where he lamented the “tragedy of Afghanistan,” where the people were subject to “intolerable conditions,” “devastation,” “immense suffering,” “total war,” and were generally “being brutalized.”6 The USSR stood guilty of “indiscriminate Soviet attacks on civilians,” who were “innocent victims of Soviet imperialism.” “Massive Soviet military forces” had invaded the “sovereign country of Afghanistan.”7
“Nowhere,” claimed Reagan, were “basic human rights being more brutally violated than in Afghanistan.” This was a result of the “brutal and unprovoked aggression by the Soviet Union.” Moscow was employing “blanket bombing and chemical and biological weapons,” a fact he noted frequently. He also noted that three million people had been driven into exile—one of every five Afghans. “The same proportion of Americans,” he calculated, “would produce a staggering 50 million refugees.”8
Reagan hoped to offer more than vocal support. As early as January 1980 he wanted to help the Muj fight and defeat the Soviets.9 Once president, his administration worked hard to get weapons to the rebels, which included shipments not just from Washington but from sympathetic nations like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, and Pakistan. CIA director Bill Casey jetted around the world prodding nations for aid and arms; he reprimanded foreign leaders when the weapons were not up to par, once in April 1981 telling a stunned Anwar Sadat that the material being supplied by the Egyptians was “garbage.”10 The Chinese provided valuable AK-47s, plus other forms of aid—details that to this day are kept tightly under wraps. “We can see Beijing too in the trenches of this dirty war,” said a reporter in an angry Izvestia article titled “Aggressors and Hypocrites.”11
So concerned was Reagan about Afghanistan that he told Gorbachev directly at the Geneva summit, which occurred several months after Gorbachev took power, that “the continued Soviet occupation of Afghanistan remains an obstacle to overall improvement in our relationship.”12 At Geneva, he excoriated the Soviets, to Gorbachev’s face, for human rights abuses in Afghanistan, including the dropping of booby-trapped toys from airplanes, which were picked up by Afghan children. Making this point in a heated reprimand of Gorbachev, Reagan then asked the general secretary angrily and pointedly: “Are you still trying to take over the world?!” Gorbachev was visibly shaken, staring at Reagan in silence, mouth agape, with a stunned expression.13
Reagan arms control director Ken Adelman, a witness, called Reagan’s words in that exchange the most “harsh indictment of Soviet behavior ever delivered to the top Soviet man.”14 Edmund Morris reported that the only person who appeared more flabbergasted was the State Department notetaker.15 Reagan was seething: like Poland, he had developed an emotional attachment to the Afghan experience. Even as it appeared that relations between the United States and the USSR were improving, Reagan continued to offer blistering assessments of the Soviet war, assessing the Soviet occupation as a “reign of terror” on the people of Afghanistan.16
Reagan’s heated rhetoric enflamed the Soviet press. To Moscow, the Afghan rebels were not freedom fighters but rather, according to the standard over-the-top language of TASS and Izvestia, “a handful of corrupted and despotic parasites,” “imperialist lackeys,” “ruffians,” “terrorists,” the “worst enemies,” or, on a good day, “barbarous and uncivilized bandits.” To call them freedom fighters was a “malicious distortion.” Hence, when Reagan spoke up for human rights in Afghanistan he was engaging in “hypocrisy,” “slander,” and “flagrant demagogy.”17
Despite the linguistic counterpunch to Reagan, by spring 1985 it had become increasingly clear that the Soviets were going to do more than just talk about escalating the war. With Gorbachev at the helm and a renewed vigor to see Soviet success in Afghanistan, the Russian military initiated a new war plan under General Mikhail Zaitsev, making the Afghan war the highest priority. Under Zaitsev, who was transferred from the prestigious command of Soviet forces in East Germany, the USSR planned to shift one-third of total special forces, known as Spetsnaz, to Afghanistan. The very best paratroops and KGB operatives were sent in, along with top battlefield communications equipment which was deployed via sophisticated Omsk vans.18 According to Aleksandr Lyakhovskii, a high-level military official who wrote an insider’s account of the war, Gorbachev gave Zaitsev “a year or two” to win.19